Features

Carriers Look to VoIP to Generate New Revenue: Study

By Sophia Mayengbam

Threatened by falling income from traditional phone service, more and more service providers are looking to voice over IP (VoIP) to help them beef up revenue generation, says Infonetics Research in a new study, 'Service Provider Plans for Next Gen Voice & IMS.'

According to the study, the service providers are looking for added features to provide the customers, who are increasingly looking for value-added services. 83 percent of the North American, European, Asia Pacific, and Central and Latin American service providers interviewed by Infonetics rated the availability of new applications and services the highest among drivers for adopting VoIP products, confirming that new revenue is the main reason they are migrating circuit-switched voice networks to packet networks.

"No longer is VoIP being offered only by specialist providers and VoIP pioneers, but by all types of providers in all regions of the world," said Stйphane Tйral, principal analyst at Infonetics for service provider VoIP, IMS, and FMC.

According to the research firm, the main challenge facing the transformation to VoIP will be replacing installed legacy gear in high teledensity areas like North America and Western Europe. The transformation will take at least 20 to 15 years said the company.

"In these areas, many carriers are letting their legacy equipment slowly churn while using VoIP now as an augmentation or an alternative, or when more capacity or expansion to a new location is needed. Meanwhile, new entrants to the VoIP market and incumbents in regions like Eastern Europe and South East Asia that are bringing teledensity up to average levels are deploying next gen voice as their primary platform," said Tйral.

The study found that the three top drivers cited by service providers for deploying VoIP are new applications and services, capex savings, and opex savings.

The service providers are expecting both incoming and outgoing VoIP traffic to nearly double over the next year, with international long distance traffic growing the fastest.

The study said session initiation protocol (SIP) for communication between softswitch/voice application servers and media servers, reaching 100% penetration among respondents by 2007.

Among the respondents the top rated benefit to deploying IMS-complinat equipment was ease of new service creation and the barriers was the complexity of multimedia services and the lack of consensus on the definition of IMS architecture.

Infonetics said that top strategies for offering fixed mobile converged (FMC) services were using SIP signaling to dual-mode handsets, integrating wireline and mobile services, and using IP core to transport voice between mobile switching centers.


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